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Here is
an excerpt of an e-mail that I received from a poker
dealer in Deadwood, South Dakota, who is a member of the
Poker Dealer Association there. It concerns the
restriction of law on
Texas
holdem
poker
stakes in that town.
“The
city of Deadwood, South Dakota, legalized gaming in 1989
with a $5 maximum bet until 2001, at which time the
limit was raised to $100. The town has 12 to 15 tables
in five cardrooms. Montana cardrooms (dealers and
players) set the standards we practice today. Through
the years, this foundation has become inconsistent. With
the growing popularity of poker, we would like to
incorporate standard guidelines for all Deadwood poker
rooms, for both tournaments and cash games. Is there
something on the subject you could suggest that would
help us become more uniform?”
Here
is the reply (slightly edited) that I sent him: “I am
happy to help you in any way that I can. You are more
than welcome to use my poker rules in your cardrooms.
That is why I wrote them and make them available at no
charge. Note that Version 5 of my rules is out now,
which I believe to be the best set of cardroom rules
anywhere. I am going to write a column on this subject
in Card Player as a result of your question. I
will e-mail you a copy of it. Thank you very much.” So,
this column is for those people who are looking for some
assistance in limiting the size of poker games in a
reasonable manner.
There is no such thing as a standard way of regulating
the size of poker games. Personally, I believe that the
size of a poker game does not need to be regulated,
because water finds its own level. By this I mean that
players in a $1,000 buy-in game can afford the stakes
they’re playing for about as well as the players in a
$100 buy-in game, or for that matter, a $10 buy-in game.
However, I understand that not everyone feels the same
way — particularly legislators. A legislator often wants
a way of reassuring the public that people are not going
to lose more than they can afford. The number of people
who need this reassurance before approving poker may not
be very large. However, to ensure that a piece of
legislation will pass — whether by a vote of the
populace or a vote of the legislating body — it may be
necessary to reach out to this group of people.
Political realities often override the optimum method of
doing something. People who have little knowledge of the
subject being voted on have a vote that counts just as
much as someone who is knowledgeable. In fact, their
vote in certain situations in a sense counts more. Take
a look at the typical voter who was still undecided in
the last week of our extremely close presidential
election. My opinion is that such a person’s poker
equivalent is the player who holds up the game while
deciding whether to play a J-2. Whichever way people
voted, I am sure that nearly all of them believed they
knew enough about the situation to have an opinion
before the eleventh hour. They saw the outrageous things
each candidate’s campaign did to reach out to the
undecided voter. It should not be a surprise when a
legislative proposal contains an unwise restriction on
poker stakes. It is not there because the poker players
think it is helpful or needed. It is there to get the
vote of a person who may well be ignorant about poker.
Although there is no standard way of restricting the
stakes for which poker is played in order to keep them
within a certain boundary, some ways of doing this are
better than others. Let’s discuss some possibilities, by
looking at methods that have been used in certain
places.
The
worst method of restricting money swings in the game
that to my knowledge has actually been employed by a
regulatory body is limiting the size of the pot to a
specified amount. In Florida, there used to be a state
law limiting pots to a maximum of $10. This was asinine
— and not just because the amount was ridiculously
small. The method was awful. It interfered with the
natural way of playing the game by preventing a player
from protecting his hand with a bet at a point in the
middle of a hand. To control the pot size, it is
necessary to either retract bets if there are so many
callers that the legal pot size is exceeded, or simply
end all betting even before the $10 limit is reached by
stopping the betting if a bet called by everyone would
exceed the legal pot size.
Another method of controlling the amount of money
changing hands is to set a limit on how much you can
bet. Apparently, this has been done in Deadwood by
setting a maximum bet size of $100. I think both this
method and the actual size chosen of $100 are quite
reasonable — for limit poker. However, the poker form
that everyone is flocking to these days is no-limit
Texas holdem. In that game, any restriction on the bet
size changes the essential character of the game. Don’t
get me wrong, playing a game with spread-limit betting
of from $5 to $100 is a decent way to play poker — but
no-limit
Texas
holdem,
it’s not. So, simply limiting the amount you can bet
puts a crimp into playing the country’s most popular
poker form. How can we control the swing in no-limit
Texas
holdem and
still preserve the basic nature of the game?
No-limit
Texas
holdem is
extremely popular on the Internet. Sites want to offer
the game, but do not want to see too many of their
customers losing large sums of money and busting out of
action. In short, they have the same interests as the
lawmakers in limiting losses in the game. Maybe
lawmakers can learn from seeing what a business that
specializes in poker does to accomplish this.
An
Internet site that spreads no-limit
Texas
holdem
controls the size of the game in two ways. First, it
keeps the size of the blinds fairly low, compared to
limit poker. There are far more limit games with a big
blind greater than $10 than no-limit
Texas
holdem
games with a big blind greater than $10. Second, it
limits the maximum for which you can buy in. There is no
set standard size, but I find the most common numbers to
be either 50 times the big blind or 100 times the big
blind.
A
$50-$100 limit game has a buy-in of $1,000, and so does
a $5-$10 blinds no-limit game. There is no question that
a $50-$100 limit game is bigger than a $5-$10 blinds
no-limit game. I would judge it to be at least as big as
a $10-$20 blinds no-limit game. So, here is my
suggestion: Control the size of a poker game by
controlling the size of the buy-in. Putting the maximum
buy-in size at $1,000 is a good way to control the size
of both limit and no-limit poker. Note that you are
never allowed to buy chips to make your stack size
greater than a grand when using this method. This
prevents multiple buy-ins from doing what one buy-in is
not allowed to do.
There is another virtue of this method of capping the
buy-in size. We so far have been talking only about
money games, but there is also tournament play to
consider. I think limiting the buy-in to $1,000 would
work well there, also. Tournaments with a $1,000 buy-in
would have to be no-rebuy events. A tournament with a
smaller buy-in could allow rebuys, but cap the amount
any player could spend in one event at a grand.
Let
me emphasize that the preferred way to treat poker under
the law is to simply legalize the game without trying to
control the stakes. However, it is the nature of
successful politics to compromise when necessary. If the
stakes must be controlled to obtain legalized poker,
limiting the amount of the buy-in is the appropriate
method in an era when the preferred poker form is
no-limit
Texas
holdem
money games and tournament events. |
